Paying the criminal to keep out of trouble with the law: Is the political system ready for a solution to rehabilitiation that could work?

There have been a multitude of initiatives which haven’t worked particularly well throughout the last few years in relation to home affairs and particularly crime prevention. Crime prevention tends not be an area of social policy that most of the public appear to be that interested in and the notion of preferring a ‘bobby on the beat’ does tend to make some sections of the community feel secure despite evidence that this is a very costly means of reducing crime and increasing perceived levels of safety in a specified area.

One area that I think could be important in terms of home office business is to try to offer greater incentive for participating in rehabilitation programmes and for staying out of crime for the critical period after this process is complete – whatever this time period may be. I assume that this will vary from criminal activity to criminal activity.

This may also stop the criminal from being too disengaged with the process of rehabilitation which may be something that they don’t engage in but rather go through the motions and don’t bother to get involved in the perhaps challenging nature of therapy. The cognitive dissonance of paying for rehabilitation may make it a far more significant activity in the mind of the ex-offender.

Having read the issues that I’d raised before in relation to the scope of neo-liberalism, I still think there is some scope to examine the role of an enforced savings programme so that an individual pays both towards the cost of the rehabilitation and also saves for a one off payment after the critical period however long this may be, say two years or five years after coming out of rehabilitation or probation services.

There are exploratory papers online that are produced by Kings Fund on the subject area of paying the patient that in some respects may raise the concern that a person may engage in health damaging behaviour with some idea that there could one day be an incentive for doing so. See:

http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/other_work_by_our_staff/paying_the.html

Whereas paying the patient may not transfer at all well to ‘paying the criminal’, what could take place is tax free saving on top of or to use an ISA allowance to offer some incentive for not re-engaging in crime. This may actually fit well with the three leaders of the major political parties at present who have some affinity with the ‘neo-liberal’ (read conservative agenda) of charging the under-privileged for what they may have paid for already. If an individual has undergone a process of rehabilitation a small lump sum, perhaps enough to buy a car or put down a deposit on a part-rent part-buy home may be exactly what is required to ensure that someone has a strong incentive to stay out of trouble with the law.

There are significant differences when considering the difference between a smoker and a burglar and payment to them for stopping their activity. A smoker may have already contributed a great deal to the treasury in terms of the volume of tax that they have paid on cigarettes that they smoke (should tax on health damaging products be levied at a rate proportional to the cost to the state in rectifying the problem: if so maybe there could be greater taxes applied to skateboarding) whereas a burglar will not have. Getting the public interested in the statistics that would reveal more effective and sometimes cost-effective initiatives would also be a major challenge - this small idea may be more plausible to initiate as a project and gain more widespread support for mainstream implementation.